In March 2019, Teradata's design function was six people with no formal disciplines, no research practice, no design system, and no career infrastructure. Over seven years, multiple rounds of layoffs and leadership transitions, the team grew to 50 people across seven disciplines. Voluntary attrition stayed at 3% throughout, well below an industry standard of 13–18%. Five people were promoted. The research practice replaced $1M/year in external consulting. Design system adoption increased consistently year-over-year. The organization didn't just scale, it held.
Context //
Teradata's design function had been consolidated from multiple consulting-era teams into a single group, but it still operated like a loose collection of individual contributors. There were no formal disciplines beyond "designer," no career ladder, no UX research capability, no design system, no defined operational model. The company was also shifting away from feature-driven delivery toward empowered product teams, which required design to operate differently across 20+ product areas. Design needed to scale, but scaling without structure ends up producing noise, not capability.
Company //
Teradata
My role //
Sr. Manager, User Experience & Design Operations (2019–2022); Director, Product Experience (2022–2026)
Team size //
6 at start, 50 at peak across 7 disciplines
Timeline //
March 2019 - February 2026
Approach //
The org was structured around seven specializations: product design, UX research, content design, technical writing, globalization, UI engineering, and design operations. Each had a distinct scope, discipline leads, and a defined relationship to the product development lifecycle. This gave people a home and a career path within their craft, and gave cross-functional partners a clear point of contact for any design problem.
I built advancement pathways for each discipline track, defined progression criteria, and held myself accountable to using them. Five team members were promoted in four years. Staffing gaps were documented formally, converting org growth from informal advocacy to a business case backed by evidence.
I personally recruited approximately half of the new hires, prioritizing craft, curiosity, and collaboration. The earliest members of the team set the cultural tone for everyone who followed.
The UX research practice was built from scratch. Stood up Dovetail and UserInterviews, established synthesis workflows, hired UX researchers, and built product intelligence infrastructure delivering weekly performance data to 40–50 product managers. LLM-assisted retrieval from the research repository, with a human in the loop, made accumulated research accessible at speed. Over time, $1M/year in external consulting was replaced by an embedded capability.
Design system adoption grew steadily because of a well-defined contribution model, leading to component quality, developer documentation integration, and making adoption easier than not adopting. Tone and voice standards, the six design principles, and quality criteria all lived in the system, making it the org's shared language of what good looked like.
I managed a $1.5M budget to $1.2M while expanding capability, through language automation (30% contractor cost reduction), $300K in platform cost savings redirected to staffing and tools, and a tool expansion from 15 to 40 full licenses plus 130 developer accounts.
Culture was mostly structure: clear roles, career paths, and work worth doing. But transparency during uncertainty, visible advocacy, and consistent advancement processes kept trust intact through years of leadership change and budget pressure.
Challenges //
Scaling without diluting craft required hiring into defined disciplines rather than filling headcount slots. The promotional criteria kept craft visible as a leadership value as the team grew
Design influence in a product-led transition required building evidence: designer-PM collaboration models, discovery requirements before engineering engagement, and converting 150+ user job requirements into trackable success metrics across eight product divisions. The argument became hard to dismiss
Surviving leadership churn and shifting priorities required building the org on principles and infrastructure, not on any individual leader's sponsorship. The design system, the research practice, the advancement criteria, and the quality framework all outlasted repeated cycles of leadership change and strategic reprioritization above them
Budget pressure required knowing what to automate, what to consolidate, and what could not be cut without losing function
The results //
Grew team from 6 to 50 across seven specialized disciplines
Maintained 3% voluntary turnover across seven years (industry standard: 13–18%) through two rounds of layoffs, repeated leadership churn, and shifting organizational priorities
Created advancement pathways that produced five promotions in four years, and gave senior staff a path to advancement that didn't have to follow a management track
Replaced $1M/year in external UX research consulting with embedded in-house capability
Grew design system adoption steadily across shipped products; served 150+ team members
Reduced operating budget from $1.5M to $1.2M while expanding team, tools, and capabilities
Identified $300K in platform cost savings and redirected to staffing and tools
Built product intelligence infrastructure delivering weekly performance data to 40–50 product managers
Guided transition from feature-driven delivery to empowered product teams across 20+ product areas
Established six design principles embedded in team language, design reviews, and post-ship instrumentation
Accelerated a major visual redesign from months to days via mature component architecture
What I learned //
The attrition number is the one I'm most proud of, not the headcount. Fifty people sounds like an accomplishment. Three percent voluntary turnover through two rounds of layoffs sounds like an organization that worked. Building something that outlasts you is harder than building something that works while you're in it. The test isn't whether things run when you're paying attention. It's whether the structure holds when things get hard.